[Wikimedia-l] ombudsmen commission

[Lodewijk]

Hi Thomas,

of course the privacy of those involved needs to be guarantueed. But
questions I had in mind were:

* How many cases were brought to your attention?
* How many of those did you consider serious enough to warrant
investigation beyond direct dismissal?
* How many cases did you take on *proactively* (without a solid complaint)?
* In how many cases in total did the committee take action (or advise the
WMF to take action)?
* How many emails did you exchange over the past year on your mailing list?
* Were you able to send a confirmation with the outcome of the case to
every complainor?
* Was the person complained about informed every time of the fact they were
under investigation?
* Is the process accurately described on meta?
* Do you have steps in place to ensure every single request gets the follow
up it needs, if not will that be improved?
* How many formal complaints were received about the functioning of the
committee?

This information could probably be summarized in a few paragraphs. I
suspect that the Board already receives such summary (the committee reports
directly to the board according to the meta
page<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman_commission>)
so an extract from that would probably be easiest. Even if that is not the
case I have the feeling it should be doable to create these numbers
afterwards for 2011. That is not only a big win for transparancy, but also
for future candidate members - they would know what they are getting into.
Finally, it allows people to evaluate if they trust the committee enough to
send their complaints to. I know several people who in the past (before the
current committee probably) have sent complaints but felt it was a black
box and have no idea what happened to them. That can be quite damaging for
the image and should be avoided.

Best,

Lodewijk

El 23 de abril de 2012 01:51, Thomas Goldammer <thogol at googlemail.com>escribió:

> Hi all,
>
> Well, I think an annual report is a good idea. However, there is not
> much we are allowed to report, for obvious reasons. I can tell you
> that we had a number of requests (about 30, depending on what you
> count as request), some of which were pretty difficult to deal with
> and therefore took a while (or are still pending). We cannot tell you
> which projects (or even people) were involved or what the results
> were. Sometimes, the language barrier was a bit hindering, so I pretty
> much appreciate the effort to maintain a level of language diversity
> within the committee, also for future committee searches.
>
> However, I want to point out that at least half of the requests that
> came to us, had nothing to do with the privacy policy and were
> therefore not dealt with in detail. We always tried to direct the
> people to the right place where they could get help for their
> individual problem, but we do not know if they actually got help. In
> most of these cases, the problem was more of a sort an arbcom would be
> able to deal with. I (personally) still very much support the idea of
> creating a Global Requests Committee, the proposal for which was
> developed last year, but has not yet been created, for whatever
> reason. This body could handle such and similar requests and some
> other things and it would ease our work as we could just give such
> cases to this body.
>
> Best regards,
> Thogo.
>
> 2012/4/23 Philippe Beaudette <philippe at wikimedia.org>:
> > <philippe at wikimedia.org>
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 3:11 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <
> nemowiki at gmail.com>wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> If they don't, the community could define some quality metrics and ask
> the
> >> commission whether they reached them.
> >
> >
> >
> > I think this is an excellent idea.  Although I'd encourage you to
> position
> > it as "this is what the community would like to see going forward" - it's
> > not fair to hold a past commission to metrics they didn't know they had.
>  :)
>
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